A dangerous game …

Mark Regev has made the statement that ‘if one side violates the peace agreement then the other is no longer bound by that agreement’. He speaks as though Israel has a record of honouring agreements with the Palestinians. Israel has no such record. Israel has not honoured peace agreements of the past just as it has not honoured UN resolutions or international human rights law. Where the Palestinians are concerned, Israel feels it has the right to operate well outside law. The international community has seen this approach to international law take shape over the past 65 years. Why should Israel change its approach now? Israel will continue its violations for as long as it feels it can do so with absolute impunity, which of course is guaranteed by its US backers. It is that simple.

The sustained bombing and destruction of Gaza has created twenty-six miles of rubble. All the facilities, sustaining personal and social life have been destroyed. Very little remains. Homes, hospitals and schools have all been destroyed. This means lifting the closure is not an option for Gaza. The closure has to be ended otherwise Gaza cannot go on. Or at least this is the thinking of Israel. Without opening the Port of Gaza, without opening the international border at Rafah, and without opening Gaza to exports and imports there can be no peace. Without any sort of future, there will remain only the conditions of slow death. No state has the right to impose such conditions on another people. This was why free Europe fought Hitler.

Were Israel steeling land and water in Europe or the Americas we would be having no debate about resistance. Imagine that Hitler had have won in 1945 and the UK had have been occupied in just the way that France was occupied we would have seen all hell being let loose. There would be no compromise with any occupying power on whatever basis. Why then do we expect something different from the Palestinians when the whole of Gaza is closed off and bombed? No one should ever have to accept an occupation, whether the occupation is of a state or not. An occupation is an occupation. It runs against every instinct of international justice. The British would unleash hell at the mere sniff of an occupation; so why should we demand something entirely different from the Palestinians? Why do we forget that it is the Israelis who moved in on Palestinians over sixty years ago and have never stopped its outrageous acts of land theft every since? Is it only nice white folks with clipped British accents that have the right to resist injustice?

The devastation in Gaza is in every direction

Israel is demanding the demilitarization of Gaza. It demands that every Arab state in the region abandons resistance because these are the conditions of Israeli security. So Israel continues its policies of arming to the hilt but all around it there must be no weapons. This is after the Middle East has been given sixty-six years of hell. Sixty-six years of an aggressive colonial setter campaign that has been merciless. Land and water facilities have been confiscated with greed that respect no one. No people would agree to these demands. When these demands are rejected, the destruction starts all over again and Mark Regev comes on Al Jazeera with the same mindless statements. Lies have become the standard line for these statements. No one believes a word Mark Regev says. Some areas in Gaza, along the security fence have sustained almost constant shelling from the air, land and sea. Incursions are daily. No one should have to live in these conditions. Drone attacks never stop. But Palestinians refuse to give up. In doing so, they have the respect of all free people. What do the Israelis have? It would seem the boycott will be the answer to that question. Homemade ‘rockets’ go off and the Iron Dome intercepts and more destruction follows. The world watches this cycle and does nothing. Yet with current technology everyone sees everything and nothing escapes the frame of global collective memory. It is not just the Palestinians that Israelis need to keep their eye on …

Israel is hated everywhere, not because of religion or any other irrelevance. Israel is hated because it kills Palestinians with complete impunity. Israel shows absolutely no sense of common humanity. Yet Israel wonders why it is seen as a state set apart from all others. Israel is a Sparta, a war state that communicates through violence. The idea is of course that it speaks with its bombs as it speaks with its leaflets, always telling the Palestinians to move on. The Palestinians will move at one point but it will be back to their 1948 villages and towns and if Israelis do not like living next door to their Arab neighbours then they can move on, back to the United States and Europe. Palestinians will stay on their land no matter how many bombs are dropped on them …

UNWRA claims more Palestinians have been made homeless during this 2014 siege than at any other time since 1967. Over two thousand have been murdered, over eighty percent of which are women and children. Schools have been destroyed and UN workers murdered along with Red Crescent ambulance men and international journalists. The Geneva Convention has been waived aside as the populations of Jabaliya and Beit Lahiya with absolutely no consideration of what is just and right. It is this impunity that will bring the downfall of the state of Israel because Israel will go too far. They now use death as a form of coercion and they are teasing out one almighty response from the whole of humanity. The game Israel is playing is unbelievably dangerous; it puts the whole world at risk and makes ordinary routine life for Palestinians pure hell. But at some point the game will be discontinued as it has on many occasions in the past.